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Chevrolet Bolt review: The case for GM’s new EV, and for one-pedal driving

Whatever else it is, the Chevy Bolt is a landmark vehicle

February 13, 2017

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Live long enough and you’ll witness a lot of stupid trends, a dozen presidents and more than a handful of landmark automobiles, even if it isn’t clear in the moment how tall those landmarks will eventually stand.

The Mustang’s debut sits at the fringe of this automotive memory, with the VW Beetle in its heyday and brief glimpses of Sir Alec’s Mini. Much clearer are the CVCC Civic and Giugiaro-penned Rabbit (and the Si and GTI) that took the Mini’s charms mainstream in the United States. There’s the XJ Jeep Cherokee, Chrysler’s S platform minivans and the Lexus LS. The first NSX for sure, and maybe the C7 Corvette. Maybe the Tesla Model S, and the hydrogen-burning BMW 760iLh -- Wait. We haven’t seen that one yet.

Decades beyond there is no precise gauge measuring which landmarks go highest, and precise measurement might be a silly exercise to start. Yet, in the moment, we’re pretty sure the 2017 Chevrolet Bolt stands tall. Unleash the dogs if you must, but understand that landmark status for the Bolt is not a political statement. We’re looking at the data and reading with the seat of the pants.

For starters, the Bolt resolves two persistent knocks on electric cars: cost and range. The data says Bolt will go further on a charge than any plug-in not called Tesla, and further than three of Tesla’s eight variants. The Bolt will go at least twice as far as other electric cars, and you can buy it now for $29,995 after a federal tax credit. Yes, you can buy another small car capable of similar work, including Chevy’s Sonic, for at least $10,000 less. But Bolt’s base price falls $4,000 below the average new-car transaction price in 2016.

The seat of the pants says Bolt is a very good small car, regardless of propulsion source, with more space than just about all of them. It’s an engineering marvel, though not for any brilliantly revolutionary element. Like many of the landmarks, Bolt’s strength lies in its synthesis and refinement of multiple good elements. It’s inexpensive to operate and engaging to drive.

The Bolt is complicated, and simple. It has 35 separate control modules integrated by a single brain, compared to 20 in a Chevy Cruze compact. It requires high-speed inverters to operate. It runs 140 diagnostic checks when you push the start button, then reaches full operating voltage in 300-500 milliseconds. It offers features like autonomous braking below 50 mph, active lane keeping and automatic high beams, but its success rests in three fundamentals: a high-capacity electric motor, properly geared half-shafts and sufficient "fuel."

General Motors’ history of electric-car production dates to the long-in-development, short-lived EV1 of the mid-1990s -- the only car branded a “GM,’’ and more costly to build than the market would bear. GM’s knowledge base runs deep. Nearly all of the Bolt development team worked on the range-extended Volt or the Spark EV, so Bolt engineers had already learned some things about appropriate aerodynamics, optimum motor or battery design and -- crucially -- optimum thermal management. Ask what they’re proudest of, and the answer is consistently "the package:" 238 miles of range with comfortable space for four under $30,000, finished on time. A few note a 0-60 mph time on par with a V6-powered Mustang.

The Bolt’s motor was developed by GM with rotating AC fields to generate torque -- a peak of 266 pound-feet, with 200 hp. It’s manufactured by LG in Korea. The gearbox is permanently lubricated, with a single 7.5:1 reduction gear to the driveshafts, a parking pawl and by-wire control.

The fuel? Sixty kilowatt hours of charged particles, flowing at 160 kilowatts and packed into 288 individual cells measuring 3.9 by 13.1 inches. The cells are packaged in a mono-block under the Bolt’s interior floor, from the firewall to the rear seat bottom, and weigh 949 pounds (135 more than the body-in-white). The battery pack is also manufactured by LG. It’s a stressed component of the chassis, according to Bolt controls manager Pat Foley, and increases torsional rigidity 28 percent compared to the unit body alone.

Battery chemistry seems like alchemy to the rest of us, but Bolt engineers say it’s crucial to their EV’s success. The nickel-rich lithium-ion compound reduces temperature fluctuations and delivers the excellent mix of energy storage (60 kWh) and power flow (160 kW). Good thermal management minimizes a reduction of range in extra-cold or extra-hot ambient conditions and helps ensure the charging life to support Bolt’s eight-year/100,000-mile battery warranty.

The Bolt, by the way, has three separate cooling circuits, including one for the motor and one for the batteries. The third feeds a conventional, radiator-type heater core for cabin heat. Together, the three use about 4 gallons of conventional coolant.

There are three charging options. Level I is the cord that comes with the car and plugs into a 110/120-volt AC household outlet. Trouble is, at 4 miles of range per hour of charging, Level I won’t get you far -- a full Level I charge takes 60 hours. Most owners will need a 220/40-volt Level II household charge station, which raises the charge rate to 32 amps and adds 24 mph of charging (roughly nine hours for a full charge). Home chargers typically run $1,500 to $2,500 installed. Buyers who use Aerovironment, Chevy’s contractor, can finance the charger with the price of the car.

Level III charging is fastest, but one Bolt engineer notes that homeowners with a DC fast charger and SAE Combo connector will be as common as those with their own gas pump. In other words, Level III means one of roughly 10,000 150-amp public chargers currently spread around the country. These deliver 90 miles of range per 30 minutes of charge, typically commanding an $8 to $10 access fee and .10 per minute. There are plenty of apps to find them, but they are not evenly distributed through our great land. For eight-car, 1,200-mile development drives up the West Coast, the Bolt engineering team used only public charging stations. For other drives in the interior, they brought a charge truck.

The Bolt’s unit body is welded up from multiple grades of steel, and its exterior metal is mostly aluminum. With a bumper-to-bumper length of 164 inches, it’s actually about 10 inches shorter than typical subcompacts like the Sonic or Ford Fiesta. Yet its 102.4-inch wheelbase is longer, closer to compacts like the Chevy Cruze and Ford Focus, and the Bolt stands 3 to 5 inches taller. Visualize the relationship of those dimensions and you’ll have a grip on the clever packaging that contributes to Bolt’s appeal.

In less floor space than a subcompact Fiesta, the Bolt delivers almost as much passenger volume (95 cubic feet) as a compact SUV like the Ford Escape (98.7). With 16.1 cubic feet of cargo space behind its rear seats, the Bolt tops all B cars and current electrified hatchbacks, including the BMW i3. There’s 56.6 cubic feet of space when the seat is folded. There’s a false floor in back that raises the load-in height and maintains something closer to level load surface when the back seat folds forward, but the floor also creates a small trunk, underneath and behind the battery.

The Bolt is suspended by conventional struts in front, with a solid stabilizer bar and what Chevy calls “handling-oriented” bushings, and a space (and cost) friendly torsion-beam axle in back. Its steering ratio is a midrange 16.8:1, and its friction brakes are all discs. Yet unless you plan on auto-crossing your electric car, or you rely on the collision-prevention electronics to pay attention for you, you won’t need the friction brakes often.

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Before you can stop, you have to go, and the Bolt definitely goes. A few exploratory jabs at the accelerator are enough to demonstrate that you can easily overpower the front wheels. Turn off the traction control and you can light ‘em up for 15 or 20 feet, escorted by a whiff of hard Michelin Green rubber. There’s a decent bit of torque steer, more than you expect in the typical compact, which is something some critics might pan. In the Bolt, it introduces an element of engagement, maybe enjoyment, as you saw at the wheel accelerating out of a corner.

The Bolt never feels like it needs more grunt -- certainly not in the context of conventional small cars -- not going up long, gradual ascents or fairly steep grades. There’s a sport button that changes the throttle progression, delivering a stronger initial response, then flattening out through the last portion of pedal travel. It doesn’t matter much if you floor the accelerator -- in either mode, it goes straight to the full 266 lb-ft.

Steering is solid. It’s firm and appropriately geared for this car, and while it isn’t exactly rousing, it’s fluent and accurate. Lateral grip is limited by the low-resistance eco tires, and understeer is the order of the day. But that too adds engagement as you work through the torque-steer to keep it between the lines, dialing in more lock or backing off the throttle a bit to slow down.

Bolt’s ride settles on the firm side, maybe surprisingly firm, and that might be aggravated by the stiff tires. You can tell there’s a solid rear axle from the slight sideward skip over randomly inopportune bumps, and you can hear the suspension working at times, thanks to the lack of engine noise. There’s positive payback, to be sure. The Bolt stays level in bends, aided by the battery layout and low mass, without the typical, slightly top-heavy crossover feeling during quick side-to-side transitions.

Then there’s what Chevy calls one-pedal driving. More accurately, it’s one-pedal, one-paddle driving, and it involves a couple of tools programmed into the Bolt’s control software.

The D on Bolt’s gear selector is the standard drive mode because it most closely replicates the behavior of a gasoline-powered car. In D, the Bolt coasts more freely when you release the accelerator. It will creep at a stoplight unless you hold the brake pedal. The L, for “low range,” changes things a bit.

Low range increases the level of regenerative braking when you release the accelerator -- more obviously capturing the energy of rolling by turning the motor into a generator and more aggressively slowing the car. In L, the Bolt sits at a dead stop without touching the brake. There’s also a paddle on the left steering wheel spoke that increases regen in both D and L. It effectively creates four steps of regen, or four levels of stopping force, and it allows you to shuttle between two of them by squeezing your fingers.

There’s an impressive amount of stop from the regen braking -- way more than gas engine compression going down a grade, and more than a few diesel compression brakes we’ve sampled. Apply full regen and it’s something like driving the Bolt into 18 inches of mud. In normal traffic flow, with minimal familiarity, you can drive it nearly all the time with one foot, pressing and releasing the accelerator, modulating regen with the wheel paddle and never touching the friction brakes. And you don’t have to drive like the proverbial Prius owner old person to do that.

If you want a list of things that can make Bolt an engaging car to drive, add one-pedal operation to instantaneous launch torque, that interesting bit of torque steer and general agility. I'd be more eager to climb into a Bolt and drive it to the lake than if a standard-tune Fiesta or Sonic or Chevy Trax were sitting in the driveway, especially when the alternatives have automatics.

Inside, the Bolt is clean, functional, comfy and sturdy, but not exactly lush or even upmarket. There are $25,000 cars with more richly finished interiors. Given that roughly a third of GM’s unit cost is sunk in the batteries, pinching pennies on upholstery is easy to understand and hard to quibble with. The Bolt does offer a range of useful instrument graphics. Its app set allows remote charge monitoring and preheating, Wi-Fi hotspot capability and OnStar navigation that considers max range in recommended routes.

There’s a lot of space, too -- certainly in back, in the compact-car context. You’ll have to be fairly tall to start worrying about rear-seat headroom. There are also things that promote a feeling of constricted visibility, like the high beltline over your shoulders and definitely the A-pillars. They’re pushed way forward, they're thick, and in tight stuff, they can block a chunk of the space where your vision wants to be. You might need to crane or lean forward to compensate. Balancing that, all Bolts come with an effective backup camera. The Premium trim adds a 360-degree overhead view and a rearview mirror that projects wide-angle video.

That 238-mile range? It’s based on Bolt’s EPA rating of 119 MPGe combined, or 28kWh/100 miles, and it accounts for about 15 percent energy recovery through regen. There’s a speed limiter just past 90 mph. Chevy engineers say that, if you started with a full charge at 65 degrees on a relatively flat oval, then kept the accelerator flat, the Bolt would travel about 160 miles before it ran out of juice. They’re less forthcoming in describing what 10 degrees ambient, or 110, might do to that range.

We can say we drove the Bolt 150 miles, up one side of the San Francisco peninsula, through the city and down the other, up and down a variety of grades, flooring it at every opportunity and finding the speed limiter more than a couple times. When we got out, the Bolt promised 74 more miles of travel.

You’ll have a full day at the wheel using a full charge in the electric Bolt. If your thing is putting big interstate miles behind you, during darkness when the way is lightly traveled, the Bolt might not be the car for you. But if you drive 50 miles to work and want to head downtown Friday afternoon for a concert or ballgame, the Bolt will get you back home anxiety-free, with range left for errands the next day and no degradation in performance. As long as you don’t need to go much more than 90 mph.

The Bolt LT retails at $37,495, including destination and before the $7,500 federal tax credit for plug-in cars. At $41,780, the Bolt Premier adds leather, the surround camera and other goodies. With all factory options -- mostly safety features like lane keep, blind-spot alert and collision mitigation -- it tops out at $43,905, or $36,405 after the credit.

It’s built at GM’s assembly plant in Orion Township, Michigan, on the same line as the Chevy Spark EV, and you can buy one now in California, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon and Virginia. The Bolt will roll out nationally by summer, though Chevy expects only 1,200 of its 3,100 dealers to sell it. It requires special dealer certification and some investment, including a DC fast-charge station.

With winds of change blowing through Washington D.C., one wonders how long the federal EV credit will last. Darren Jesse, GM’s EV program manager, seems reasonably confident it will. The credit is not open-ended; it applies to 200,000 sales per manufacturer before it begins to phase out. GM has used roughly 100,000 for the Volt, Spark EV and Cadillac ELR, and it hopes the remaining 100,000 are sufficient to get the Bolt established and begin realizing some economies of scale. If the federal program is abruptly slashed, a handful of states, including California, might be expected to increase their own subsidies.

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Ultimately, landmark automobiles can rise or fall on circumstances beyond the control of people and companies that build them. Yet if Bolt makes a legitimate case for landmark status, how can it surpass the sexier, amazingly quick Tesla Model S, which brought functional range to electric cars four years earlier?

Easy enough. The least expensive Model S starts at more than twice the price of the more efficient Bolt LT. The ultra-quick Model S P100D starts at $135,700, or 4.5 times the Bolt’s base price. The Model S is simply out of reach for the great majority of new-car buyers, and old timers in this biz will remind you that it’s harder to make a good car for $30,000 that it is to make one for $100,000.

Tesla sold 24,000 Model S sedans in 2016, or 12,000 fewer than Chevy’s Spark EV, which cost about $21,000 after the federal tax credit and has about one-third the range of the Bolt.

The case for landmark status does not consider how we’ll generate electricity to power the Bolt, or what would happen to energy prices if there were a significant shift to electric-powered automobiles, or where the winds of political change take us, or even how effectively Chevy markets the Bolt. It’s not that things can change. It’s that they certainly will change, and we can only guess how. It will matter over the longer term which source of fuel consumers consider more reliable, electricity or gas.

As cars go, the Bolt will be inexpensive to operate. It’s as close to maintenance-free as any automobile rolling, and if its owner takes to one-pedal driving, it will be a long time before he or she needs to replace brake pads. At $2.50 per gallon of gas and the EPA’s combined rating of 30 mpg, the 1.4-liter Chevy Sonic with automatic will cost its owner 8.34 cents per mile for fuel. At current residential rates in Chevy’s hometown of Detroit, an owner will pay 4.2 cents per mile to power a Bolt, or 4.6 cents in Los Angeles. Significant advantage, Bolt.

At least on operating costs. A Bolt owner will have to drive it upward of 200,000 miles before reduced operating costs cover the extra $10,000 he shelled out at purchase, and that doesn’t account for the huge expense of a battery replacement. The decision to buy a Bolt cannot be rationalized strictly in economic terms. It requires emotional, social or political considerations, which people apply to car purchases every day.

All things accounted for, including what can’t be accounted for, the Bolt is a landmark because it’s a very good car, the best pure electric car yet -- and it feels like the tipping point where, for better or worse, mainstream electric cars get real traction in the marketplace.